On 20 September 2021 19:27:27 BST, Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On 9/20/21 11:03 AM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
I also believe that discriminating against countries like Angola and Niger is unacceptable. But the solution to that is the same as it always has been - to include full data for each ISO country, using best efforts for data that is not certain.
I addressed this issue toward the end of my recent email to Tom Lane <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030422.html>, which I sent about the same time you sent your email.
The *only* good faith move you can make right now is to revert the patch.
We disagree on this point. This morning I made a different good-faith move, by installing the "Revert May patch to zone.tab" patch into the development database. I suggested another potential good-faith move in that recent email to Tom Lane.
I continue to think that it would be better to work together to find a common solution, than to insist on one unalterable position.
I'm with Stephen here. I don't think that unless the offending patch is reversed there can be an agreeable way forward. We can then take it from there.
The approach you argue for arbitrarily discriminates too, saying that Germany is more important than Norway or Sweden.
The guideline is not arbitrary; it chooses the most-populous city, in this case Berlin. Although every guideline has a bias of some sort, it would be a quite a stretch to say that this particular guideline has racial, ethnic or national bias, which is the concern here.
You might not see that, but developers and users in Norway or Sweden definitely will see this as being a snipe. Stephen tried many months ago to come up with a set of statements and suggestions to come up with a reasonable policy on what to do, and although there were some issues with that, there was at least an attempt to codify a way forwards. These suggestions have been met by silence from the coordinator. I've also not seen any response to the formal complains that were sent to IANA. I don't like the idea of a fork, mostly because it serves nobody to have two competing versions of tzdb, but right now I can't see another way out... cheers Derick